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Comment by warfangle | Hacker News Reader

My High School AP CS class was C++, with a very heavy focus on data structures, up to and including balanced binary search trees (we had covered linked lists, doubly linked lists and other more basic data structures, including pointer math, in CS 3/4). Second semester was a self-directed team project. This was in 2001-2002.

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Oh wow. Mine (2010) was in Java, and featured elementary OOP (class/object distinction, inheritance, abstract classes vs. interfaces, polymorphism) and array/ArrayList usage. And reading—but not writing—recursive functions. Implementations of data structures and the mere existence of non-list data structures weren't even hinted at. (And this wasn't just a problem with my school—I aced the class got an easy 5 with the above knowledge.)

I'd consider data structures much more foundational than Java-flavored OOP. It worries me that the curriculum has swung in this direction.

Yeah. We covered operator overloading, OOP (minus polymorphism) in CS 3/4 -- along with learning C++! CS 1/2 was all in Pascal.

I should also note that this was a public (magnet) school in the RTP area. CS 1/2 and 3/4 all had ~10-15 students; AP only had about 8. Almost everyone in all of these classes had been programming long before high school. These were old IBM DOS machines. 486ish I think. On a token ring network (one of the guys wrote a rudimentary chat program that worked locally on the network)

I took it at a magnet school too (the same year), but I'm pretty sure the basic curriculum was dictated by the AP test, which tested data structures and the like heavily.

You were running a token ring network in 2001? Whoa.

I had almost the same setup at a public (non-magnetic) school. No Pascal though - all C++ on NT. I'm not sure if I had the 'average experience' or not. I suspect not.

Yeah; we were running borland turbo c++ 3.0! how modern; wow!

It was actually pretty great: we didn't have to go through learning a new IDE (we were using turbo pascal the previous year). We didn't have to learn weird GUI stuff. We just focused on the curriculum.

It's worth noting around 2009 that the harder Computer Science exam was no [longer being given by AP][wikipedia]. The course I had was AP Computer Science aimed at the AB test back in 2004-2005. It was in Java but every bit as rigorous as the one described by the grandparent's in C++.

Supposedly it was discontinued due to a lack of people taking it, but that was partly due to the fact that it's not a core subject and I assume because it was quite a bit more difficult than the others. I recall taking the Calculus AP BC exam as well and trivially scoring a 5 on it, while the Computer Science AB exam was actually fairly difficult, even though I spent a significant amount of time learning algorithms and data structures, implementing all of them myself, and reading lots of code. One point of anecdata, but in my experience someone who did score a 5 on that exam was likely very well ahead of the curve going into a university. I was able to skip I believe 3 courses at my university based on earning a 5, and I doubt the same is true of the present A exam.

[wikipedia]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Computer_Science#AP_Compute...

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